So I was trying to get back home from having my car’s wheel bearings checked out.
The wheel speed sensors all report the same speed, which is good, so we’re just going to have to look into things on a day when it’s not raining outside, as this can trip up the diagnostic. (You don’t know if the computer is putting on the ABS for real or if it’s glitching.)
Then I decided, “Why not just put in my McDonalds order through the app on my phone? They have coupons.”
Just to be safe, I screenshotted the confirmation number and receipt.
On my way home there’s the typical Chicago suburbs crap. Overturned semi-truck, guy in a stolen Dodge Charger wrapped around a tree at 100 miles an hour, school where they teach that boys are girls and girls are boys letting out.
By the time I made it 3 miles, it had been half an hour, so obviously my McDonalds app decided to crash, come back up, log me out, glitched when I tried to tell it which store I was at and went into a loop between the map and the ordering screen, and then told me the store was closed at 3 PM.
I got them to finally figure out that the order was in “the other cash register” and picked up my food.
When I got home, down the street, I realized, they had given me the wrong sandwich and they put disgusting nacho cheese and jalapeno pepper slices all over a burger? Gross! To add to this, I asked for fries with no salt and got those disgusting packing peanut heatlamp fries with too much salt
So this being Chicagoland, you can’t just do what you did in Indiana and call and have the manager push through a refund and then scrape the jalapenos off the burger and eat it. So I hopped back in the car, went down there, and told them they got the order wrong and I would like the correct burger and a fresh order of fries, with no salt.
They brought me the burger, then they brought me another bag with the fries.
I get home, there’s another burger in the bag with the fries, so I just put it in the fridge and asked my spouse if he wants it for lunch tomorrow.
In 1990, you went to McDonalds, handed them some cash, everyone paid the same price.
Maybe they asked if you wanted a 25 cent apple pie with your $2 Big Mac because 1990.
IBM sure made them efficient.
The Ketchup Nazi took a sabbatical:
On the bright side, they had a big pile of ketchup on the counter.
For a long time you had to ask, and when you said “a bunch”, “a lot”, or “look, at least give me enough for more than three fries”, they gave you 2-3 packages, or sometimes 30 packets, depending on how pissed and fuck-this-place the worker was after seeing their schedule that week.
So I started calling them the “Ketchup Nazis”, after that episode of Seinfeld where they had an Eastern European guy with a Stalinist mustache, which they called the Soup “Nazi”.
If you did anything to piss him off, he banned you from his restaurant, but his customers learned his peculiarities and “not to push it” if he made a mistake, because his soups were so good.
One day, George comes in and says they forgot his free bread. So the “Soup Nazi” tells him bread for him will be $2. Then when George complains everyone else got free bread, the “Soup Nazi” bans him from the store for two years.
He ends up getting Elaine to go in and buy soup for him incognito, after several others fear getting on the “Soup Nazi’s” bad side and refuse for fear of being banned as well, but Elaine doesn’t know the “Soup Nazi’s” protocols, and gets herself banned too.
Eventually Kramer, who is good friends with the “Soup Nazi”, gets a nice antique cabinet and sells it to Elaine, who finds out the “Soup Nazi” left all his recipes inside it.
She walks down to the store and tells him to unban them or she’ll ruin his business and “NO SOUP FOR YOU!”.
Anyway, I’m trying to get my CoC complaint against Walter Francis/Khaytsus, at the Fedora project to the point where it’ll be no soup for Walter. But I doubt his friends will do that to him.
Speaking of “hyperstagflation”…
One of “He Who Would Never Commit a CyberCrime’s” sockpuppets was in Techrights IRC the other day.
He got me in a reading binge on this infamous counterfeiter in the 1800s.
The guy was a German immigrant, Emanual Ninger, nicknamed “Jim the Penman”.
I don’t remember how the topic the troll brought up was germane to the German, but I got lost in the side quest.
Apparently, he bought paper from Crane & Company, the same source as the US Government for US bank notes, and although it was not the same exact paper, it was their best quality bond paper, and he set out to trace the bills and then draw in every tiny detail. He skipped the part about being produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing because “dey didn’t make dem”, and also the part about counterfeiting being punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, but almost nobody ever noticed.
He finally got careless one day and got pinched because he made change for a $50 at a liquor store and the note got wet and the ink started running, and the owner of the establishment had Ninger found and arrested. The judge took leniency on him because of his age and frailty.
To this day, there are collectors of “Ninger Notes” because they’re highly sought after works of art, illegal to possess. The few people who have one don’t want to draw attention, for the Secret Service would come and demand it.
I was thinking about Ninger while I was on the toilet at Panda Express, after having paid $32 for two people to eat dinner yesterday.
It took Mr. Ninger, “Jim the Penman”, weeks of hard work and expensive materials (the paper, mainly) to make a $20 or a $50 (his favorite) or a $100, but it was worth it because those bills were all worth thousands of dollars in today’s money.
In fact, “Jim” probably did the $50 so much because a $100 was an eye watering amount of money back then and hard to explain, and almost certain to be closely inspected even if it would have been appropriate in-context to the transaction.
Ostensibly, the reason the Secret Service would show up is that counterfeiting is a risk to the economy, it destabilizes it, it’s inflationary.
The problem with this is nobody would spend a “Ninger Note”. They’re almost priceless because so few survived the trial and the Secret Service destroying them.
Even if the notes wouldn’t look so out of place today, nobody would ever part with a Ninger $50 that’s worth about $10,000 under-the-table to another art collector, on a meal at Panda Express, which is about all it buys now due to the economic destabilization and inflation of…….“Joe the Biden”.
Set to work producing $100s, it would take Emanuel Ninger 2.684 billion years to produce enough money to fund the federal government for a year, or 5.369 billion years if he did it in $50s, his favorite. ⬆